Which Answer Are You Allowed to Act On? The Line Every Solo Builder Draws by Hand
There’s a question every solo builder answers eventually, usually by getting it wrong once: Which answers am I allowed to act on without checking? Not “which tasks can AI do” — that’s a capability question and the answers change every few months. This is a sorting question, and it doesn’t change with the model. It changes with the task. The framework — and why it isn’t the article Let me be honest up front, because we do this on every post: the grading framework itself is not new, and it is not ours. Regulators, enterprise security teams, and academic groups have all published versions of it. Microsoft’s agentic-risk guidance says require approval for high-risk or irreversible actions. A recent DeepMind paper on delegation names reversibility as the axis that decides how much authority you can hand over. Practitioners publish permission matrices grading actions by blast radius × reversibility × stakes. If you want the general framework, those sources will serve you better than a solo-builder blog, and I’ll list them at the bottom so you can check them. ...